Christmas=The Doctor+Santa

A blue light flashes in and amongst the blackened fingers of winter. You stare and within each pulse of this unknown light your heart dances and breaks a little at the thought that it may not return.

Your thoughts belay your senses but it’s too late, one foot hastily pressed into one shoe and then the other and now both are beating an audible crunch along a snowy pathway from where you hope to see from the window, where you moments ago listlessly stared out of, a shadow of yourself wondering why he didn’t run sooner.

The forest sways as you draw closer towards it. The ground now beats the same rhythm of the light as if someone where banging a stone into the earth beneath you. (Oi, this isn’t creative corner! -Ed)

The rhythm stops and there, not inches from your face, a blue wooden panel but this panel isn’t like any other you’ve come across; this one hums.

Good King Wenceslas if you’re not mistaken. A tiny crack of light appears in the door and as you peer into the orange glow a man, an impossible man, bounds out of the light, awash with the red, blue and green of Christmas lights that hang from his person.

His face elongated at every feature yet in beautiful harmony with itself beams at you:

“Welcome to Christmas!”

What happens next is beyond memory – instead events like scenes from a movie played backwards or upside sit just at the periphery of understanding – all that’s there to guide such memories towards sensible collusion is a voice, a voice of promises:

“The Doctor at Christmas – it always just feels so right. When I was a kid, Santa and the Doctor somehow lived in the same place in my head – two generous madmen that I loved so much. So now that the Doctor is a regular feature of Christmas the world is just that bit more right.

A voice of familiar and unfamiliar ideas; of families torn from their homes by the tyranny of war, by children protected from the truth by a strong, sympathetic mother and of a mysterious caretaker in a bow tie.

“As ever, at this time of year, the Doctor is trying to make things right, and as always it doesn’t go according to plan. But maybe he’s reckoned without the power of a determined mother.”

A uniting voice:

“This Christmas, it might just be the lonely Time Lord who’s shown the way home.”

Then the voice stops, the light fades, and you stir from whatever realm of consciousness your now dismissing as silly, impossible, outlandish. Pity. Christmas thrives on such things, things like The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe…

Editor’s note:

We’d like to apologise for the preceding news item which was overflowing with unnecessary literary pretension and colourful descriptions. It seems that Andrew has found the secret stash of Sontaran Ale here at Kasterborous Towers and over-indulged himself. However, he apologises and has promised not to let it happen again.

Everyone has a favourite Doctor and mine - just for his honesty, his fairness and his ability to not notice the Master's awful, awful disguises/anagrams (Sir Gilles Estram!?!) - has to be the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison. The stories didn’t serve him as well as his acting served those stories.